Sacred Places, Sacred People

The Fall 2021 edition of the ACLU Magazine shares an article by Anita Little entitled “Buried Truths.” Little begins by telling the story of Darrell “Soul” Semien, a black man who served fifteen years as a law enforcement officer in Oberlin, Louisiana. At age 55, Semien died from cancer. His widow and family wanted him to be buried in the nearby Oaklin Springs Cemetery. When they inquired to make arrangements, they were in for a shock.

A representative of the cemetery told them that a clause in the burial contract specified that use of the cemetery was restricted to “the right of burial of the remains of white human beings.” The ACLU became involved in the matter and sent a letter to the cemetery board, demanding removal of that contract clause and a revision of the cemetery by-laws, which had been in place for all of the more than seventy years of the cemetery’s existence.

The board acted quickly to remove all race-based restrictions from its contracts, to destroy all previous copies that included the “whites only” covenant and to remove the employee from working with families in such matters. The board president offered the family one of his own plots in the cemetery as part of the reparations. Understandably, the family refused and went elsewhere.

It would be one thing to hear this story as an artifact of some previous generation. This series of events, however, took place in 2021. ACLU officials believe that such hidden covenants and other restrictions still lie buried in documents across the South and across the country. Alanah Odoms, director of the ACLU of Louisiana said, “We suspect this is the tip of the iceberg.”

Supreme Court decisions have rendered race-based covenants unconstitutional over the last seventy years. But that does not mean they are irrelevant. “That this language exists in so many places, even if it’s not enforced,” Little writes, “also acts as a signal, a reminder that this country and its promises were meant for only a select few. Removing these covenants from documents,” she observes, “would be simple, and the lack of organized effort to do so communicates the racism that vigorously thrives beneath the veneer of changed laws.”

Little reviews the history and impact of restrictive covenants on the racial wealth gap in this country. She quotes a 2019 Federal Reserve Board survey that shows median household income for Whites at $188,200, for Latinx families at $36,100, and for Black families at $24,100. This disparity is the result of decades of intentional policies – especially the downstream results of redlining. In Minneapolis, for example, White families are three times as likely to own their homes as Black families.

The actions of the Oaklin Springs cemetery board were not the end of the matter either. Little reports that a white person who has a plot in the cemetery “threated to file a legal complaint stating that with its actions, the ACLU was violating his right to be interred in a whites-only cemetery as per the burial contract he signed.” Of course, the plaintiff claims to be “not-racist.” Instead, he argues “that he has ‘preferences’ that include being ‘laid to rest in a white cemetery.’”

“And again, calling the crowd to himself, [Jesus] said to them, ‘Listen up and get this straight! There is nothing outside of a person which entering into that person is able to defile that person; rather what defiles a person is that which comes out of that person” (Mark 7:14-15, my translation).

The racism of White supremacy uses the external marker of skin tone to identify a group of people as “impure.” That deep, visceral belief in the mythology of Black impurity teaches, justifies, and mandates the desire to have separate cemeteries. This belief is handed from generation to generation and makes White people insane when it comes to something like sharing public swimming pools. Better to close the pools, the mythology says, than to risk being “contaminated.”

The racism of White supremacy is handed on, taught, deepened, expanded, and enforced from generation to generation. It is, in the most literal of terms, a “Tradition of the Elders” which is passed on to our children and grandchildren. It is not in Hebrew or Christian scriptures, no matter what some exegetes might manufacture as evidence. We know when the mythology was invented and why. We can trace its transmission history. We can demonstrate that it is not written into the fabric of biology, sociology, history, or politics.

According to Jesus’ declaration to the crowds, we can render a judgment on who would “defile” the “holy ground” of the Oaklin Springs cemetery by being laid to rest there. It would certainly not be the remains of Darrell Semien. Mr. Semien’s remains would honor that space in light of his of public service.

The remains of the plaintiff coming after the ACLU would be another story. What defiles is what comes out of us – the products of our hearts. The overt racism, the threats of legal violence, the self-deception, the casual deceit, the avarice, and hatred spill out of the report Little offers to us in the plaintiff’s own words. When he is buried in that cemetery, he will certainly defile that holy ground.

I hope this report illustrates just how careful we must be with this “purity” text in our preaching. I think we must take into account and discuss our position of power lest we get into any sort of cultural, political, ethical, or physical redlining.

It’s one thing to be a subject people who are just barely holding on to their identity in the face of a massive, assimilationist empire. To put it in the best light, the Pharisees are trying to keep Israel in one piece and relatively faithful under the domination of just such an imperial system. They may have gotten it backwards, as Jesus points out. They may have used the system to their own advantage (clearly, they did). But they occupy a position as subjects under subjugation.

We dare not put ourselves into the same social position unless we really are in such a position. But White, mainline Christians are not in that position. We are representatives of the exploitive, extractive, imperial system called White Male Supremacy. Unless we come to terms with that difference, our reading of this text will make us dangerous to any and all who are subjugated under that system.

“Purity” in the hands of the oppressor is a highly useful tool to sustain the oppression. That’s one of the downstream effects of the racialized purity system in this country. That’s why it’s worth remembering those restrictive covenants which led to the redlining that produces the current disparities in household wealth, educational opportunities, employment, health outcomes, and home ownership. When we draw lines, we create outsiders who can be exploited.

We rely on external features to determine how the lines are drawn. But, Jesus says, you can’t do that! Those external features don’t defile. Instead, our policies and practices that keep people oppressed based on external features – those things do defile. They come from our avaricious, deceitful, hate-filled, fear-soaked hearts. The system of White Male Supremacy, therefore, defiles everything and everyone it touches.

You might think I’m taking the text too far in this regard, but I don’t think so. “And when they went into the house away from the crowd, his disciples asked him about the parable” (Mark 7:17, my translation and emphasis). Jesus’ declaration is a parable, so it’s meant to be interpreted, applied, and expanded. After all, the audience for Mark’s gospel were mostly Gentile Christians. They, too, needed to figure out what this meant for them.

Perhaps the good news here is in the accurate diagnosis Jesus offers. There are no crimes such as “driving while Black,” or “shopping while Black,” or “walking in the park and bird-watching while Black.” Those are made-up things – the traditions of our Elders that we need to abandon. Knowing this can help us to repent and make repairs, the first steps toward real growth.

“We cannot repair the harms that we have not fully diagnosed,” Little quotes Rakim Brooks, senior campaign strategist at the ACLU as saying. “Our history has shown us that it’s not enough to take racist policies off the books,” Brooks asserts, “if we are going to achieve true justice. We need,” he concludes, “systemic solutions.”

Little suggests that we also need the imagination to begin to see what that repentance and repair can look like. Jesus offers a different vision of purity and defilement, one rooted in the human heart. That’s where our imagination is rooted. We can stop looking at the outsides of people and embrace our common humanity as fellow bearers of the Divine Image. And as Little concludes, our imagination needs to encompass the same quality of life for all people, with all sorts of “outsides.”

As I noted in the previous post, the preacher needs to keep this conversation in the context of the upcoming reading. It’s almost as if the writer of Mark’s gospel wants to remind Jesus that talk is cheap. He will immediately have the opportunity to put his principle into action as he encounters the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7:24-30. I mention that because it’s probably important not to over-promise yet on Jesus’ commitment to inclusion.

We’ve got some work to do next week.

References and Resources

“Cutting Off the Ends of the Ham.” https://www.executiveforum.com/cutting-off-the-ends-of-the-ham/.

Dewey, Joanna. The Oral Ethos of the Early Church: Speaking, Writing, and the Gospel of Mark. Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

FURSTENBERG, Y. A. I. R. (2008). Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Contamination in Mark 7.15. New Testament Studies, 54(02). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688508000106.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2010.

Kenny, Andrew. “Surprise, Colorado: The guy who sold all those ‘NATIVE’ stickers is a transplant.” https://denverite.com/2018/05/25/surprise-colorado-natives-inventor-beloved-bumper-sticker-utah/.

Little, Anita. “Buried Truths.” ACLU Magazine (Fall, 2021), pages 16-21.

Malbon, E. (1989). The Jewish Leaders in the Gospel of Mark: A Literary Study of Marcan Characterization. Journal of Biblical Literature,108(2), 259-281. doi:10.2307/3267297.

Malina, Bruce. The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology 3^rd Edition. Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Malina, Bruce; Rohrbaugh. Richard. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Oswald, Roy M., and Friedrich, Robert E. Jr. Discerning Your Congregation’s Future: A Strategic and Spiritual Approach. New York: Alban Institute, 1996.

Skinner, Matt. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22-2/commentary-on-mark-71-8-14-15-21-23-5.

Tisby, Jemar. How to Fight Racism. Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Webb, Elizabeth. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22-2/commentary-on-mark-71-8-14-15-21-23-4.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Listen Up!

The narrative in Mark 7:1-23 mentions at least four “audiences” for Jesus’ teaching on the purity rules of the elders. In verses 1-13, the audience is the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem. In verses 14-15, the audience is the crowd (verse 16 is excluded from modern translations, but that’s another story). In verses 17-23, the audience is Jesus’ disciples, who receive additional instruction in private, based on their question.

The fourth audience is those who are listening as the gospel account is performed orally. The narrator turns to the “real” audience in verse three and explains the handwashing practice of “the Pharisees and all the Jews.” Never mind for now that not all the Jews, even among those present, behave in this way. The narrator turns once again to the “real” audience to offer a brief explanation of the rules of Corban. And the narrator turns a final time to declare that Jesus, in this conversation, has “declared all foods clean.”

We can draw several insights from these simple observations. First, there is a “real” audience assumed by the author of the Gospel according to Mark. Malbon notes that these dramatic asides function to both acknowledge the distance between the “real” audience and the internal audiences and to increase that distance. It’s clear that the “real” audience doesn’t know the significance and procedures of the traditions of the elders. It’s also clear that the gospel account wants to move the identification of the “real” audience toward the disciples.

If the proposals of performance criticism are correct, and I think they are, this gospel was performed over and over again for audiences in the decades following the Resurrection. In fact, Joanna Dewey argues that the gospel of Mark was composed orally. What we have is one transcript of that oral composition.

That presumed fourth audience is invited to identify with each of the audiences inside the narrative. It’s not that they were required to pick one of the three and stick with that one. Instead, each of the three internal audiences portrays a possible response to Jesus and his teaching in this narrative. Each of those three responses is possible in the same person – sometimes, perhaps, all at once.

Dewey writes, “the audience at a performance of Mark’s gospel, insofar as the narrative came alive for them, would identify sequentially with the various characters and events of the narrative” (page 102). In an oral setting, the audience would be taken along on the journey with all of the characters in the drama. She notes that oral/aural texts are “additive” and “aggregative” rather than exclusive and binary. There’s something to be learned from each of the three audiences here.

The author of Mark’s gospel certainly wants us to be clear that the Pharisees and some of the scribes, from Jerusalem, do not accept Jesus’ teaching in this regard. The question they offer may have been innocent enough – an attempt to diagnose Jesus’ theological position on the relatively novel “traditions of the elders” in Jerusalem. Jesus sees beneath the question to how it works out in daily life. Those traditions can be used to undercut the very intentions of God’s commandments.

The center point of the chiasm in Mark 7 is addressed to the crowd. “And calling again to the crowd, he said to them, ‘Listen to me, all [of you] and understand! There is nothing outside of a person when it enters into that one which is able to profane that person; rather, the things which profane a person are those which come out of a person” (verses 14-15, my translation). This is the theme of the address in this chapter, but it is opaque to the disciples.

The disciples then request additional instruction. We might hear Jesus’ question to them as a critique, but that’s not necessarily the only way to hear it. Dewey argues that in an oral context, the critiques of the disciples “would probably have been taken much less seriously by a first-century listening audience than by modern scholars accustomed to printed texts” (page 78). Jesus’ question here may have been more of an observation than a criticism.

Instead, oral presentations were and are far more adversarial in presentation than we might expect from a written text. This is part of the drama of the presentation. In fact, the first audience might have expected this sort of highly charged language but would not have evaluated the disciples with nearly as much negative judgment as we do with our written document biases “The negative portrayal of the disciples,” Dewey writes, “may well have seemed to audiences merely part of a normal story” (page 100).

“The hearers enter a world in which the courage to move forward in following the Markan Jesus,” Dewey writes, “in spite of and through human failure as experienced through the disciples—becomes a possibility, even a reality. The oral/aural story does not primarily convey historical information,” she argues, “it gives meaning and power to a way of life, to a cosmos become real in performance” (page 101).

In light of this analysis, we can experience the disciples in the depth in which they are presented. Lay people who hear and read Mark’s gospel get this quite easily, in my experience. They don’t experience the text as a way to evaluate and then exclude the disciples in some way. Instead, they hear the stories of these enthusiastic bumblers and feel an immediate empathy and identification. If those clods can be central to the mission of Jesus, then I can as well!

That being said, the disciples don’t define faithfulness. Jesus does. “The audience is indeed called to imitate Jesus’s life and death but perceives Jesus, not the disciples, as the authority,” Dewey argues. “In the narrative, the disciples provide a means to teach about discipleship and illustrate for the listening audience both successes and failures in following Jesus” (pages 111-112).

The disciples, here and elsewhere in Mark, teach the “real” audience what following Jesus looks like and what it doesn’t look like. Their questions are not reasons for embarrassment. The questions create the opportunities for Jesus to teach them more. That’s certainly the case here in Mark 7.

This can be encouragement for every timid lay person who is sure that one must have a theology degree before coming to a bible study class. If the disciples didn’t ask questions, our gospel accounts would be much shorter and far less informative. We are invited to be people who love the questions at least as much as, and probably more than, the answers.

But what is the question here? The question really is something like this: what allegiance do we owe to a system that protects the status quo of power, position, privilege, and property? After all, that’s how this system really works out in practice. Jesus points precisely to and critiques this reality. The only ones who can really stick with the Traditions of the Elders are those folks who don’t have to work for a living – the Jerusalem aristocracy. Everyone else is just out of luck.

The Pharisees and some of the scribes from Jerusalem come to police Jesus on his boundary-breaking. The gospel account notes that it is the Pharisees and all the “Jews” who are able to observe these traditions. There are no punctuation marks in the original Greek of the text, so we have to supply them. And the written text gives very few indications of the “tone” of a sentence.

I propose that in this passage we put scare quotes around “Jews” as a way to indicate that it’s a highly self-selected crew that has the leisure to observe the finer points of the Tradition and to regard themselves as the only “real” Jews. This is, therefore, one of the many ways that the elites maintain their privileged status and continue their profitable accommodations with the Imperial administration. The Pharisees – at least some of them – are the agents of the aristocracy in the outlying districts such as Galilee.

Jesus is resisting this oppressive, collaborationist regime and the system it supports. He equips the crowd with a set of slogans to begin to analyze and question their own situation. Some of them may become radicalized as their consciousness is changed. Others won’t notice and will go looking for whichever populist hero bakes the best bread.

Disciples are those who have been called into the resistance campaign Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. The question before the disciples is always the same. Are you in? More to the point, are you all in? Will you move from being an “ally” to being an “accomplice” in the resistance movement? Part of the drama of the Gospel of Mark is that we don’t know quite how it turns out, even at the end of the story.

I would transpose our text into this anti-racism key as one way to bring some application to the text. As a white person, I am prone to the default of white supremacy and the privileged status that I can simply take for granted as a result. It takes effort to maintain that default, but I’m so used to it and so ready to believe this is the “natural” state of affairs that I don’t even notice the work I’m doing.

Or I can begin to grow in awareness and start to resist this system of the status quo. I’m not going to do very well in that resistance — just like those disciples. I’m not going to get it right in this life, but I can’t let those failures deter me from continuing the struggle. The disciples kept looking for the big payoff for their investment in the Jesus program. Jesus kept telling them that resistance is its own reward. They didn’t get it until after the Resurrection, and even then it was with halting steps at best.

White male supremacy is our best contemporary example of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep our traditions. We white people really do believe that we have always been superior, and we act as if that has always been the case. We don’t want to hear that white male supremacy is a fabricated story designed to undergird our systematic exploitation of other human beings made in the image of God. I suspect the Pharisees and scribes didn’t want to hear the critique Jesus offered either.

Are we making void the word of God through our traditions, our habits, our systemic structures, and unconscious assumptions? There’s a way to rile up a congregation, eh?

References and Resources

Dewey, Joanna. The Oral Ethos of the Early Church: Speaking, Writing, and the Gospel of Mark. Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Kenny, Andrew. “Surprise, Colorado: The guy who sold all those ‘NATIVE’ stickers is a transplant.” https://denverite.com/2018/05/25/surprise-colorado-natives-inventor-beloved-bumper-sticker-utah/.

Malbon, E. (1989). The Jewish Leaders in the Gospel of Mark: A Literary Study of Marcan Characterization. Journal of Biblical Literature,108(2), 259-281. doi:10.2307/3267297.

Malina, Bruce. The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology 3^rd Edition. Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Malina, Bruce; Rohrbaugh. Richard. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Oswald, Roy M., and Friedrich, Robert E. Jr. Discerning Your Congregation’s Future: A Strategic and Spiritual Approach. New York: Alban Institute, 1996.

Skinner, Matt. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22-2/commentary-on-mark-71-8-14-15-21-23-5.

Tisby, Jemar. How to Fight Racism. Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Webb, Elizabeth. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-22-2/commentary-on-mark-71-8-14-15-21-23-4.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Common Humanity

Purity rules are always about people in the end. The story we tell may be about land or food or clothing. But those material things always represent the differences we construct between people: the insiders and the outsiders, the honorable and the dishonorable, the natives and the foreigners, the good and the bad. We humans love hierarchies, and we will fixate on almost any feature of existence in order to establish a pecking order with us at the top and someone else at the bottom.

I lived in Denver, Colorado, for a few years in the early 1980’s. That was the time of the “Native” bumper stickers. Colorado was a popular place for pilgrims seeking their version of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” They (we, for a while) came from all over the country and all over the world to enjoy the skiing and the columbine, the low humidity and high meadows. It was difficult to find someone who was actually born in Colorado and still lived there.

The few folks who made up the aristocracy of birth began a movement expressed on green bumper stickers decorated with a background of mountain peaks and displaying the title “NATIVE.” This designation placed them above the rest of us mere mortals who had the misfortune to be born somewhere else and to feel the need emigrate to God’s country.

There were several edges to this label. “Natives” were, according to some, inherently better than the interlopers and better-suited to their home state. The non-natives were invaders who brought with them all sorts of foreign ideas, customs, and priorities. They (we) were dilettantes who came for the skiing and left when the snow turned to mud. The natives were the only ones really deserving of the best real estate and were deeply resentful of all the outside money that drove up the prices and reduced the inventory.

Non-natives were, somehow, “impure.” Some folks struck back in kind with a variety of parody bumper stickers. There was “Semi-native,” “Naïve,” and “Alien.” My favorite was the one that rejected the whole enterprise. It read “WHO CARES?” Only later did most of us find out that the original idea for the “NATIVE” campaign originated with a transplant named Eric Glade. After a few years the campaign petered out, but the message stuck with me.

It takes very little for us humans to whip up a caste system, out of whole cloth if we need to do so. “A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits,” writes Isabel Wilkerson, “traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system,” she continues, “uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places” (page 17).

Wilkerson focuses on the caste systems in India, race-based America, and Nazi Germany to examine the common features of each system. “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson observes. “It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is,” she concludes, “about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not” (page 17).

Because of the role of power in caste systems, not every purity system is a caste system. The Hebrew purity system came into being when the people of Israel were in desperate need of an identity they could preserve in the face of the Babylonian imperial juggernaut. The rules about Sabbath, food, and circumcision, were boundaries that helped to identify the Jews as a people and to keep them from being assimilated into the mass of Babylonians.

The purity system did not produce any advantages in that setting. If anything, it created additional problems for the subject people, who might have had an easier time if they had just melted into the Babylonian pot. In that setting, the Jewish purity system was not a way to gain power over others. It was a way to survive as a people. Clinging to that system could cost one their life, as Richard Swanson notes in describing the story of Eleazar as recorded in IV Maccabees.

“All enduring human societies offer their members ways of making sense out of living by providing systems of meaning,” Malina and Rohrbaugh write. “Such systems consist essentially of largely imaginary lines drawn around self, others, nature, time, and space. When something is out of place as determined by the prevailing system of meaning,” they continue, “that something is considered wrong, deviant, senseless. Dirt is matter out of place” (page 222).

It is one thing to have a system that maps out the relationships in life in such a way as to provide a framework of meaning and purpose. But human beings, over time, find it nearly impossible, I think, to resist the temptation to use that system to establish a caste system which affords advantages to the in-group that sponsors the system.

It was one thing to point out that there were still a few “Native” Coloradans hanging around in the sea of newcomers. That was just a fact. And those “natives” could indeed offer some insights into life along and among the great Rocky Mountains. If the “Native” label were regarded as a gift, an asset, something to be offered up for the good of all, it might have been a salutary thing. But it was claimed as a resentful privilege and a mark of preferred purity.

It wasn’t long before a few people noted the astonishing and immoral presumption in the label as well. The real “natives” of the land weren’t white people who happened to have been born within the boundaries of Colorado. The real natives were the people whose people had been on that land long before Colorado was even a consideration. The real natives were the people whose people had been on that land when the ancestors of the pretenders were still expelling the Romans from northern Europe.

Every human hierarchy is constructed on a false foundation. Jesus understands this, names it, and challenges the presumptions of the purity system in Israel at the time. It’s not the covenant itself that he challenges. It is the way the purity system is now used to underwrite systems and structures of power, to serve self-interest rather than God, and to sustain the divisions constructed to uphold the system in the first place.

Purity rules are always about people in the end. No, that’s not quite right. Purity rules are always about power in the end. In Jesus’ earthly ministry, the purity system was based on rules that had meant something quite different in Bronze Age Israel and in Iron Age Judea. Now that system was being used to police the poor, to control women, and to prop up the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem. Regardless of their intentions, the Pharisees participated in that caste system, and Jesus challenged that participation.

In our own culture, of course, the purity system is based on race. “In very stark and quantifiable terms,” writes Heather McGhee, “the exploitation, enslavement, and murder of African and Indigenous American people turned blood into wealth for the white power structure. Those who profited,” she continues, “made no room for the oppressed to share in the rewards from their lands or labor; what others had, they took. The racial zero sum,” she argues, “was crafted in the cradle of the New World” (page 9).

Our own purity system of race was the story we constructed that made Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery not only possible but positive goods. It is the story that made possible lynchings and Jim Crow laws. It is the story that underwrote redlining and the segregation of schools, medical care, job opportunities, and wealth accumulation that are part of our life today. It is the story that sought to erase real “Natives” from the land and to enslave Africans kidnapped from their homes.

Our own purity system of race is the story that continues to put white males at the top of the hierarchy and to push black people back down to the “mudsills” of society. In the process of pursuing this system, we have created a culture that makes poor white people believe that there’s nothing better than being better than black people, and that any price is worth paying to keep that fact true.

“Since this country’s founding,” McGhee writes, “we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower, and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be,” she argues, “And if it were, all of us would prosper” (page 289). When purity systems do nothing but underwrite the existing hierarchies of power, almost everyone suffers – including the parents of that hypothetical person who has dedicated their old age pension to the support of the Jerusalem temple.

“You abandon the commandment of God,” Jesus argues, “and hold to human tradition.” That commandment, as we hear later, is to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Traditions that lead us away from those commandments, no matter how well-intentioned in the beginning, defile all who participate in them. So, the human traditions we call the system of white supremacy make us all dirty – and we white folks most of all.

References and Resources

Kenny, Andrew. “Surprise, Colorado: The guy who sold all those ‘NATIVE’ stickers is a transplant.” https://denverite.com/2018/05/25/surprise-colorado-natives-inventor-beloved-bumper-sticker-utah/.

Bruce Malina; Richard L. Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Tisby, Jemar. How to Fight Racism. Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.